Jonson and the Psychology of Public Theater

Jonson and the Psychology of Public Theater
Author: John Gordon Sweeney
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2014-07-14
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1400857139

This book is a study of Ben Jonson's relationship with his audience in the public theater, as the relationship changed in the course of his career from the comical satires to Bartholomew Fair. Originally published in 1984. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Passionate Playgoing in Early Modern England

Passionate Playgoing in Early Modern England
Author: Allison P. Hobgood
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2014-01-23
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1107041287

Passionate Playgoing in Early Modern England examines the emotional effect of stage performance on the minds of the early modern theatre audience.

Libels and Theater in Shakespeare's England

Libels and Theater in Shakespeare's England
Author: Joseph Mansky
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2023-09-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 100936278X

The first comprehensive history of libels in Elizabethan England, this interdisciplinary study traces the crime across law, literature, and culture, focusing especially on the theater. Ranging from Shakespeare to provincial pageantry, it provides a fresh account of early modern drama and the viral media ecosystem springing up around it.

Ben Jonson’s Theatrical Republics

Ben Jonson’s Theatrical Republics
Author: J. Sanders
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 272
Release: 1998-08-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230389449

This timely book challenges conventional critical wisdom about the work of Ben Jonson. Looking in particular at his Jacobean and Caroline plays, it explores his engagement with concepts of republicanism. Julie Sanders investigates notions of community in Jonson's stage worlds - his 'theatrical republics' - and reveals a Jonson to contrast with the traditional image of the writer as conservative, absolutist, misogynist, and essentially 'anti-theatrical'. The Jonson presented here is a positive celebrant of the social and political possibilities of theatre.

Ben Jonson

Ben Jonson
Author: Richard Dutton
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2014-07-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317893751

Interest in Ben Jonson is higher today than at any time since his death. This new collection offers detailed readings of all the major plays - Volpone, Epicene, The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair - and the poems. It also provides significant insights into the court masques and the later plays which have only recently been rediscovered as genuinely engaging stage pieces.

Ben Jonson, John Marston and Early Modern Drama

Ben Jonson, John Marston and Early Modern Drama
Author: Rebecca Yearling
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2016-01-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1137563990

This book examines the influence of John Marston, typically seen as a minor figure among early modern dramatists, on his colleague Ben Jonson. While Marston is usually famed more for his very public rivalry with Jonson than for the quality of his plays, this book argues that such a view of Marston seriously underestimates his importance to the theatre of his time. In it, the author contends that Marston's plays represent an experiment in a new kind of satiric drama, with origins in the humanist tradition of serio ludere. His works—deliberately unpredictable, inconsistent and metatheatrical—subvert theatrical conventions and provide confusingly multiple perspectives on the action, forcing their spectators to engage actively with the drama and the moral dilemmas that it presents. The book argues that Marston's work thus anticipates and perhaps influenced the mid-period work of Ben Jonson, in plays such as Sejanus, Volpone and The Alchemist.

Ben Jonson's 1616 Folio

Ben Jonson's 1616 Folio
Author: Jennifer Brady
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
Total Pages: 236
Release: 1991
Genre:
ISBN: 9780874133844

This collection of nine original essays, is a major study of the 1616 Folio as a work of art, as a turning point in Jonson's career, and as an unprecedented event in English letters and printing.

Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England

Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England
Author: Tanya Pollard
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2005-02-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0191533769

Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England asks why Shakespeare and his contemporary playwrights were so preoccupied with drugs and poisons and, at a deeper level, why both critics and supporters of the theater, as well as playwrights themselves, so frequently adopted a chemical vocabulary to describe the effects of the theater on audiences. Drawing upon original medical and literary research, Pollard shows that the potency of the link between drugs and plays in the period demonstrates a model of drama radically different than our own, a model in which plays exert a powerful impact on spectators' bodies as well as minds. Early modern physiology held that the imagination and emotions were part of the body, and exerted a material impact on it, yet scholars of medicine and drama alike have not recognised the consequences of this idea. Plays, which alter our emotions and thought, simultaneously change us physically. This book argues that the power of the theater in early modern England, as well as the striking hostility to it, stems from the widely held contemporary idea that drama acted upon the body as well as the mind. In yoking together pharmacy and theater, this book offers a new model for understanding the relationship between texts and bodies. Just as bodies are constituted in part by the imaginative fantasies they consume, the theater's success (and notoriety) depends on its power over spectators' bodies. Drugs, which conflate concerns about unreliable appearances and material danger, evoked fascination and fear in this period by identifying a convergence point between the imagination and the body, the literary and the scientific, the magical and the rational. This book explores that same convergence point, and uses it to show the surprising physiological powers attributed to language, and especially to the embodied language of the theater.

Metadrama and the Informer in Shakespeare and Jonson

Metadrama and the Informer in Shakespeare and Jonson
Author: Bill Angus
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2016-09-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 147441513X

Have you ever wondered what was really going on in the inner-plays, secret overhearing, and tacit observations of early modern drama? Taking on the shadowy figure of the early modern informer, this book argues that far more than mere artistic experimentation is happening here. In case studies of metadramatic plays, and the devices which Shakespeare and Jonson constantly revisit, this book offers critical insight into intrinsic connections between informers and authors, discovering an uneasy sense of common practice at the core of the metadrama, which drives both its self-awareness and its paranoia. Drama is most self-revealing at these moments where it reflects upon its own dramatic register: where it is most metadramatic. To understand their metadrama is therefore to understand these most seminal authors in a new way.

Ben Jonson: Authority: Criticism

Ben Jonson: Authority: Criticism
Author: R. Dutton
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 277
Release: 1996-03-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 023037249X

Ben Jonson: Authority: Criticism is the first book-length study of Jonson's literary criticism, and examines the ways that criticism defines his unprecedented role as a professional author. Each chapter explores a different facet: 'The Lone Wolf' looks at Jonson's role in creating a critical discourse to respond to a new literary market-place; 'Poet and Critic' explores the relationship between his 'creative' and 'critical' writing; 'Poet and State' traces his accommodations as an author with censorship and other forms of authority; 'The Laws of Poetry' relates his appeals to classical precedent to his insecurity in a world where literary conditions were very different from those of ancient Greece and Rome; 'Jonson and Shakespeare' examines the old supposed rivalry as evidence of competing definitions of authorship. Throughout Richard Dutton suggests how Jonson's criticism set the terms for the profession of letters in England for more than a century. Finally an appendix provides a representative selection of Jonson's critical work.